John R. OstafVisual Artist

Biography

Perhaps the diversity of being born in Canada’s hottest area, Lytton, BC on a cold January morning, led me to be the high school photographer, to a successful entrepreneur and culminating in today’s adventure of visualizing and creating artistic photographic images.

Spending extensive periods of time, getting to know the natural light, shapes, colours, and textures in a defined graphical area, enables my processing of and identifying the specific subject matter for my photographs.

In the creation of actual or abstract qualities in my photographs, there is often a correlation between painting and photography and as you view my imagery, you may find why my passion to create is not only for my individual world, but also to respect and enhance a personal vision of the past, present and future memories.

SargassoScape – Artist’s Statement

This creation of SargassoScape, is a valued collectible artistic series of abstracts representing a myth under the sea that allows the exploration of visual and transparent reality of colour and shape providing intrigue to the viewer.

Sargasso Sea is a vast patch of living seaweed providing a home to an amazing variety of marine species that live in this vast 3,500,000 square kilometer Sea in the Atlantic Ocean.

Labyrinth Convoluted – Artist’s Statement

Whatdo we see within the LABYRINTH CONVOLUTED images, a dark and foreboding juxtaposition of convoluted colours or labyrinth of monochrome concrete structures that tell you they are old and tattered ready to be torn down or do the walls say that I have endured over 100 years with much more experiences yet to come.

These 6 canvas images – #’s 1 – 3 on display – (uniquely mounted on Cedar planks that may have been growing since Captain James Cook surveyed this very coast) portray the structures at Battery Clark at Fort Stevens in Oregon and Battery Harvey Allen at Fort Camby are located across the mouth of the Columbia River from each other.

The monochrome images offer the viewer an adventure of exploring a labyrinth. Does one visualize the narrow doorway that may lead us to sunshine or to circuitous halls and stairways to an unknown dead-end?

Now that presents a dilemma, as one views these images how do they choose the one(s) they feel most inquisitive about, a colour convolution or the association with a monochrome to complete the journey.